A pup-tent Potemkin Village rises along the Delaware

(Ed Murray/The Star-Ledger)Empty tents in back of the Statehouse in Trenton.

I’ll say this for all those unionized public employees: At least they chased away the geese.

The geese in question normally occupy what used to be a perfectly good parking lot next to the Statehouse. The state tore up that lot and seeded it with grass as part of an abortive scheme to build a park it couldn’t afford.

The state can’t afford much of anything these days. Hence, the tents.

When I pulled up to the Statehouse yesterday morning, I saw a vast expanse of pup tents covering the lawn formerly occupied by those web-footed invaders. In theory, the public workers would occupy the tents to show their resolve in combating pension and benefit reforms that would be considered mild in the private sector.

From a distance, the tent city looked impressive. You could imagine struggling workers forced out of their houses and consigned to living under a roof of ripstop nylon.

After I parked and walked over to the site, however, I noticed something fishy. The tents were brand new and all but a few were of the same brand. And they were in ruler-edged lines, something you’d never see at a real campground. Where were the coolers? The barbecue grills? The sleeping bags? And then there was the biggest oversight of all: the portable toilets. This campsite had as much of a resemblance to reality as the storied facade that General Potemkin erected to resemble a city.

I wondered where the union leaders were staying. Some wag standing nearby joked they were staying at the Marriott, a fine hotel about a hundred yards away.

They could certainly afford it. When I headed out to State Street to watch the speeches, I got chatting with a guy who was holding a "Don’t Tread on Me" flag. I thought he might be a lone anti-government protester.

My mistake. It turned out he was a teacher and union leader from Hudson County. When I asked the guy how much he made, he told me about $100,000 a year.

No wonder he loves the union. So did the many Democrats on the floor of the state Senate yesterday who rose to oppose the reform bill. The rhetoric was flowing faster than the Delaware at flood stage, and it was all designed to elicit sympathy for the allegedly downtrodden.

"We continue to ask those with the least to sacrifice the most," said one senator. Huh? I’ve got friends who are losing their houses because they can’t afford the taxes. Ask them if having a public job with great benefits, lifetime job security and a nice pension is a sacrifice.

Then there was the senator who compared the public employees to demonstrators who fought for civil rights in the 1960s in the South. Those courageous souls got set upon by police dogs. Here, the cops shut off State Street for the demonstration and then stood around bored, watching over the pup tents.

As for the actual vote, it was anticlimactic. State Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) headed up a coalition of conservative-leaning Democrats who joined the Republicans for a 24-15 margin.

Afterward, Sweeney held a news conference during which he debunked the union workers’ primary argument: that changes in pensions and health benefits should be negotiated through collective bargaining rather than imposed by legislative action.

Nonsense, Sweeney said. Over the years, the unions have gotten the legislators to hand them all sorts of goodies — from cost-of-living adjustments to a 9 percent pension hike.

Sweeney, who’s a union official, noted that people in private employment have to accept what they get at the bargaining table. "I don’t have a body I can go to as a union ironworker and say, ‘I couldn’t get this at the bargaining table, so give this to me and I’ll vote for you,’ " he said.

The public employees do. And, as Sweeney noted, they got so much that they brought their own pension plans to the edge of bankruptcy.

I don’t know if any of those geese that used to hang out near the Statehouse ever laid a golden egg. If so, they’d be wise to stay away from the Statehouse until the union leaders leave town.

UPDATE: I filed that column about 4:30 Monday afternoon. Around 5 p.m. I wandered out back to see whether any of the thousands of demonstrators on State Street had returned to the campaground to do what they were supposed to do - camp.I didn't see a single camper. Then a big Dodge Sprinter van pulled up. It had the words "New Jersey Education Association" on it. A couple of people wearing red shirts and presumably union officials began to supervise a crew of workers as they took the tents down one by one, rolled them up, and threw them in the van.This was a demonstration, all right: A demonstration of a union grown so comfortable that the members can't even put up their own pup tents - never mind sleep in them.